Foundation and data collection

The products that form the entry point for sending data into Datadog. This group covers the Agent, integrations, and the other pieces you touch first when you start monitoring.

Datadog AgentSoftware that runs resident on the servers and containers you monitor and delivers metrics, logs, and traces to Datadog.IntegrationsIntegrations are the bundle of entry points that pour data from external systems such as AWS and MySQL into Datadog. Where you configure them splits into two families, the Agent side and the cloud account side, and which one you choose changes both what you can see and how billing is counted.MetricsFrom CPU utilization to user sign-ups, metrics are the core data of Datadog, recording every number in your environment as a time series. If you understand how they are counted before how they are collected, you avoid both aggregation mistakes and billing accidents.OpenTelemetry SupportAn explainer on the intake for feeding traces / metrics / logs from apps instrumented with OpenTelemetry straight into Datadog. There are 4 ways to receive the data, and which one you choose changes which Datadog features you can use.TaggingThe backbone of Datadog: attaching key:value labels to metrics, logs, and traces so they can be filtered and aggregated across data types. As a feature it is unglamorous, but the quality of your tag conventions determines the usability of every screen afterward and the size of your bill.